Book Review: Hunger by Roxane Gay

Hunger:
A Memoir of My Body
By Roxane Gay
HarperCollinsCanada
Release date: June 13, 2017

Roxane Gay is a bestselling author, but she also happens to be obese. At her heaviest she weighed 577 pounds.
Hunger: A Memoir of My Body is Gay’s story of how and why she became so overweight.
“I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. This is my refrain. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this,” Gay writes.
At 12, Gay was gang raped by a boy she thought she was in love with and a group of his friends. It’s a shocking story, one that Gay tells with heartbreaking honesty and straightforward truth.
“When it was all over, I pushed my bike home and I pretended to be the good daughter my parents knew, the good girl, the straight-A student,” she writes.
Gay told no one what had happened. Instead, she started eating.
“With every day that went by, I hated myself more. I disgusted myself more. I couldn’t get away from him. I couldn’t get away from what those boys did. … Hating myself became as natural as breathing,” she writes.
She ate for comfort and she ate to build a protective armour for her body.
“I was swallowing my secrets and making my body expand and explode. I found ways to hid in plain sight, to keep feeling a hunger that could never be satisfied — the hunger to stop hurting,” she writes.
Gay, who lives in Lafayette, Indiana, is the bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a collection of essays that made the New York Times bestseller list. She also wrote the novel Untamed State and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. She’s also an English professor at Purdue University.
She stoically tells her devastating story, not looking for pity or outrage, but expressing a deep need for others to understand her life.
Gay has dug deep into her own psyche and shared the results with readers in this unflinching, revelatory memoir. She speaks of things that aren’t often talked about – what it’s like to use a seatbelt expander, how humiliating it is to worry about whether a chair will hold you, or what it’s like to visit a doctor for anything other than your weight when you are morbidly obese.
She talks about a lifelong aversion to anyone touching her and an inability of letting anyone treat her with love and affection. She tells how when a friend offers her a bag of chips to eat on a long plane ride, she replies, “People like me don’t get to eat food like that in public.” She writes about how hard it is to go the gym, because people tend to stare and give her constant encouragement when she just wants to be left alone.
“There are days when I am feeling braver. There are days when I am feeling, finally, like I can shed some of this protection I have amassed and be okay,” she writes.
Hunger is not an easy read, but that’s due to the painfully traumatic subject matter, not the writing. Gay is a flawless, smooth writer, whose story is harrowing and all too familiar.
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